Lisbon today. In a room of a house at Douradores Street, a man invents dreams and theorizes about them. The essence of the dreams itself becomes physical, palpable, visible. The text itself materializes in its musicality. And, in front of our eyes, this music can be felt with the ears, brain and heart. It spreads itself in the street where the man lives, in the city that he loves above all and over the entire world. A restless film based in fragments of The Book of Disquiet, by Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa. –São Paulo International Film Festival
João Botelho is the Portuguese filmmaker of memory, whose films seek to transform the physical into the metaphysical and to render ideas and poetry physical. His work is based on the word, a creative approach that is almost more poetic than cinematographic and which was already demonstrated in his debut feature, Conversa Acabada (1982), a conversation between two great Portuguese writers, Fernando Pessoa and Mário de Sá-Carneiro, that could be defined as an epistolary framework for an examination of what is articulated through different times and fashions: a conversation that is anything but ‘finished’ (‘acabada’).
His subsequent films include Hard Times (1987) and Aqui na Terra (1993), for which he wrote the screenplay. In 1999 he was in the Venice Film Festival with Se a Memória Existe which received a good critical reception. He returned to Venice with Quem és Tu? (2001) from a novel by Almeida Garrett called Frei Louis de Sousa, and in… read more
fodaç - um plano brilhante e realista , talvez até hiper-realista misturado com o cruel romantismo de pessoa. belo !
Devo dizer-te que este me ficou aqui meio entalado, não consegui engolir... muita estima tenho porém pelo João Botelho e não duvides que isto vale o mesmo que o tão espezinhado "uma mulher que julgava ser presidente da américa"... Ser acerca do Pessoa não lhe dá mais qualidade do que se fosse acerca aqui do talhante da minha rua. Se assim fosse era muito fácil fazer cinema.... Não consegui engolir este por completo, mas longe de mim fazer aquelas figuras tristes dos detractores dos filmes portugueses, em que metem tudo no mesmo saco e acham que o César Monteiro se resume a umas piadas porquinhas e o Oliveira é muito respeitável porque é velhinho. Sem ressentimentos, espero o próximo João Botelho de braços abertos.
the director could have done much better, filming Fernando pessoa walking around Lisbon reciting his poetry makes the film a little bet hard to watch, it was beautiful, but he could have used the tools the cinema gave him much better to create a great film, not just a good film where great poetry is being recited
Adaptar poesia para o cinema nunca é fácil, ainda mais quando o autor em questão é Fernando Pessoa. O diretor João Botelho foi radical: fez um filme a partir do texto do Livro do Desassossego, criando… read review
